In modern usage, the term "Bohemian" is applied to people who live unconventional, usually artistic, lives. The adherents of the "Bloomsbury Group", which formed around the Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf in the early 20th century, are among the best-known examples. The original "Bohemians" were travellers or refugees from central Europe (hence, the French bohémien, for "gypsy").

Reflecting on the fashion style of "boho-chic" in the early years of the 21st century, the Sunday Times thought it ironic that "fashionable girls wore ruffly floral skirts in the hope of looking bohemian, nomadic, spirited and non-bourgeois", whereas "gypsy girls themselves ... are sexy and delightful precisely because they do not give a hoot for fashion".[1] By contrast, in the late 19th century and first half of the 20th, aspects of Bohemian fashion reflected the lifestyle itself.

Pre-Raphaelites[edit]

In 1848 William Makepeace Thackeray used the word bohemianism in his novel Vanity Fair. In 1862, the Westminster Review described a Bohemian as "simply an artist or littérateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art". During the 1860s the term was associated in particular with the pre-Raphaelite movement, the group of artists and aesthetes of which Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the most prominent:[2]

As the 1860s progressed, Rossetti would become the grand prince of bohemianism as his deviations from normal standards became more audacious. And as he became this epitome of the unconventional, his egocentric demands necessarily required his close friends to remodel their own lives around him. His bohemianism was like a web in which others became trapped – none more so than William and Jane Morris.[3]

Jane Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and pre-Raphaelite traits[edit]

Jane Morris, who was to become Rossetti's muse, epitomised, probably more than any of the women associated with the pre-Raphaelites, an unrestricted, flowing style of dress that, while unconventional at the time, would be highly influential at certain periods during the 20th century.[4] She and others, including the much less outlandish Georgiana Burne-Jones (wife of Edward Burne-Jones,[5] one of the later pre-Raphaelites), eschewed the corsets and crinolines of the mid-to-late Victorian era,[6] a feature that impressed the American writer Henry James when he wrote to his sister in 1869 of the bohemian atmosphere of the Morrises’ house in the Bloomsbury district of London and, in particular, the "dark silent medieval" presence of its chateleine:

It’s hard to say whether she’s a grand synthesis of all the pre-Raphaelite pictures ever made … whether she’s an original or a copy. In either case she’s a wonder. Imagine a tall lean woman in a long dress of some dead purple stuff, guiltless of hoops (or of anything else I should say) with a mass of crisp black hair heaped into great wavy projections on each of her temples … a long neck, without any collar, and in lieu thereof some dozen strings of outlandish beads.[7]

In his play Pygmalion (1912) Bernard Shaw unmistakably based the part of Mrs. Higgins on the then elderly Jane Morris. Describing Mrs. Higgins' drawing room, he referred to a portrait of her "when she defied the fashion of her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes which, when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular estheticism [sic] in the eighteen-seventies".[8]

A biographer of Edward Burne-Jones, writing a century after Shaw (Fiona MacCarthy, 2011), has noted that, in 1964, when the influential Biba store was opened in London by Barbara Hulanicki, the "long drooping structureless clothes", though sexier than the dresses portrayed in such Burne-Jones paintings as The Golden Stairs or The Sirens, nevertheless resembled them.[9] The interior of Biba has been described by the biographer of British 20th century designer Laura Ashley as having an atmosphere that "reeked of sex ... [It] was designed to look like a bordello with its scarlet, black and gold plush fitments, but, interestingly, it implied an old-fashioned, Edwardian style of forbidden sex with its feather boas, potted palms, bentwood coat racks and dark lighting"[10] MacCarthy observed also that "the androgynous appearance of Burne-Jones's male figures reflected the sexually ambivalent feeling" of the late 1960s.[11]

Early flower power: Effie Millais[edit]

Effie Gray, whose marriage to John Ruskin was annulled in 1854 prior to her marrying the pre-Raphaelite painter John Millais, is known to have used flowers as an adornment and probably also as an assertive "statement". While in Scotland with Ruskin (still her husband) and Millais, she gathered foxgloves to place in her hair. She wore them at breakfast despite being asked by her husband not to do so, a gesture of defiance, at a time of growing crisis in their relationship, that came to the critical notice of Florence Nightingale[12] (who tended to regard others of her sex with "scarcely concealed scorn" and was generally unsympathetic to "women's rights"[13]). A few weeks earlier, on Midsummer Day, Effie (possibly inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream) was said by her hostess, Pauline Trevelyan, to have "looked lovely" with stephanotis in her hair at an evening party in Northumberland,[14] while, the previous year, a male friend had brought glass flowers for her hair from Venice.[15] Ruskin's father was evidently shocked to learn that, when Effie herself was in Venice, she had removed her bonnet in public, ostensibly because of the heat.[16]

In 1853 Millais painted Effie with Foxgloves in her Hair which depicts her wearing the flowers while doing needlework. Other paintings of the mid-to-late 19th century, such as Frederick Sandys' Love's Shadow (1867) of a girl with a rose in her hair, sucking a sprig of blossom, which was described in 1970 as "a first rate PR job for the Flower People",[17] and Burne-Jones' The Heart of the Rose (1889),[18] have been cited as foreshadowing the "flower power" of the mid-to-late 1960s.

Early 20th century and inter-war years[edit]

Rational dress[edit]

The pre-Raphaelite look was still considered "advanced" in the late years of the 19th century,[19] by when movements, such as the Rational Dress Society (1881), with which the Morrises and Georgiana Burne-Jones were involved, were beginning to exercise some influence on women's dress. Queen Victoria's precocious daughter Princess Louise, an accomplished painter and artist who mixed in bohemian circles, was sympathetic to rational dress and to the developing women's movement generally (although her rumoured pregnancy at the age of 18 was said to have been disguised by tight corsetry).[20] However, it was not really until the First World War that "many working women ... embarked on a revolution in fashion that greatly reduced the weight and restrictions imposed on them by their clothing".[21] Some women working in factories wore trousers and the brassiere (invented in 1889 by the feministHerminie Cadolle[22] and patented in America by Mary Phelps Jacob in 1914) began gradually to supersede the corset.[23] In shipyards "trouser suits" (the term, "pantsuit" was adopted in America in the 1920s) were virtually essential to enable women to shin up and down ladders.[24]Music hall artists also helped to push the boundaries of fashion; these included Vesta Tilley, whose daring adoption on stage of well tailored male dress not only had an influence on men's attire, but also foreshadowed to an extent styles adopted by some women in the inter-war period. It was widely understood that Tilley sought additional authenticity by wearing male underclothing, although off stage she was much more conventional in both her dress and general outlook.[25]

The impact of lingerie in the 1920s and 30s[edit]

The Penguin Social History of Britain noted that "by the 1920s newspapers were filled with advertisements for 'lingerie' and 'undies' which would have been classed as indecent a generation earlier".[30] Thus, in Ben Travers' comic novel Rookery Nook (1923), a young woman evicted from home in her nightwear and requiring day clothes remarked, "Combies. That's all right. But in the summer you know, we don't ...",[31] while in Agatha Christie's thriller, The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), the aristocratic heroine, Lady "Bundle" Brent, wore only "a negligible trifle" under her dress; like many real life "it girls" of her class, she had been freed from the "genteel expectations" of earlier generations.[32] In Hollywood the actress Carole Lombard, who, in the 1930s, combined feistiness with sexual allure, never wore a brassière and "avoided panties".[33] However, she famously declared that though "I live by a man's code designed to fit a man's world ... at the same time I never forget that that a woman's first job is to choose the right shade of lipstick"[34] Coincidentally, sales of men's undershirts fell dramatically in the United States when Lombard's future husband, Clark Gable, was revealed not to be wearing one in a famous motel bedroom scene with Claudette Colbert in the film It Happened One Night (1934). According to Gable, "the idea was looking half-naked and scaring the brat into her own bed on the other side of the blanket [hanging from a clothesline to separate twin beds]". However, he "gave the impression that going without was a vital sign of a man's virility"[35] More generally, the adoption by the American movie industry of the Hays Production Code in the early 1930s had a significant effect on how moral, and especially sexual, issues were depicted on film. This included a more conservative approach to matters of dress. Whereas the sort of scanty lingerie on show in some earlier productions (for example, Joan Blondell and Barbara Stanwyck in Night Nurse, 1931)[36] had tended to reflect trends that, in the 1920s, defied convention and were regarded many young women as liberating, by the early years of the Depression such displays came to be regarded quite widely as undesirable. Developments in the late 1960s and 70s, when the strictures of the code were abandoned, followed a similar pattern, although, by then, it was often women themselves who were in the vanguard of resistance to sexualised imagery.

Looking back at this period, Graves and Hodge noted the protracted course that "daring female fashions had always taken ... from brothel to stage, then on to Bohemia, to Society, to Society's maids, to the mill-girl and lastly to the suburban woman".[37]

The "Dorelia" look[edit]

Among female Bohemians in the early 20th century, the "gypsy look" was a recurring theme, popularised by, among others, Dorothy "Dorelia" McNeill (1881–1969), muse, lover and second wife of the painter Augustus John (1878–1961), whose full skirts and bright colours gave rise to the so-called "Dorelia look".[38] Katherine Everett, née Olive, a former student of the Slade School of Art in London, has described McNeil's "tight fitting, hand-sewn, canary coloured bodice above a dark gathered flowing skirt, and her hair very black and gleaming, emphasiz[ing] the long silver earrings which were her only adornment".[39]

Everett recalled also the Johns' woods "with wild cherry trees in blossom, and ... a model with flying red hair, clad in white, being chased in and out of the trees by nude children".[40] With similar lack of inhibition, as early as 1907 the American heiress Natalie Barney (1875–1972) was leading like-minded women in sapphic dances in her Parisian garden,[41] photographs of which look little different from scenes at Woodstock in 1969 and other "pop" festivals of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Bobbed hair and cross-gender styles[edit]

By contrast, short bobbed hair was often a Bohemian trait,[30] having originated in Paris c.1909 and been adopted by students at the Slade[42] several years before American film actresses such as Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks ("the girl in the black helmet") became associated with it in the mid-1920s. This style was plainly discernible on a woodblock self-portrait of 1916 by Dora Carrington, who had entered the Slade in 1910,[43] and, indeeed, the journalist and historian Sir Max Hastings has referred to "poling punts occupied by reclining girls with bobbed hair" as an enduring, if misleading, popular image of the "idyll before the storm" of the First World War.[44]

Around 1926 an even shorter style, known as the "Eton crop", became popular:[49] on her arrival in Tilling (Rye) in E F Benson's comic novel Mapp and Lucia (1931), Lucia described "Quaint" Irene as "a girl with no hat and an Eton crop. She was dressed in a fisherman's jersey and knickerbockers". (In the same book, Miss Mapp frequently – and topically – addressed Lucia, to her irritation, as "Lulu".) For many years trite assumptions were often made about the sexuality of women with cropped hairstyles; an historian of the 1980s wrote of the Greenham Common "peace camp" in England that it "brought public awareness to feminist separation and even to lesbianism, hitherto seen in the mass media – when acknowledged at all – either in terms of Eton-cropped androgyny or of pornographic fantasy".[50] Even so, others have drawn a stark contrast between the bohemian demeanour of the Greenham women and the "bold make-up and power-dressing" that tended to define women's fashion more generally in the 1980s[51] (the so-called "designer decade").

One social historian has observed that "the innocuous woollen jersey, now known [in Britain] as the jumper or the pullover, was the first item of clothing to become interchangeable between men and women and, as such, was seen as a dangerous symptom of gender confusion".[52] Trousers for women, sometimes worn mannishly as an expression of sexuality (as by Marlene Dietrich as a cabaret singer in the 1930 film, Morocco, in which she dressed in a white tie suit and kissed a girl in the audience[53]) also became popular in the 1920s and 1930s, as did aspects of what many years later would sometimes be referred to as "shabby chic". Winston Churchill's niece Clarissa was among those who wore a tailored suit in the late 1930s.[54]

Post-Liberation Paris[edit]

The "New Look"[edit]

After the Second World WarChristian Dior's "New Look", launched in Paris in 1947, though drawing on styles that had begun to emerge in 1938-9,[55] set the pattern for women's fashion generally until the 1960s. Harking back in some ways to the Belle Epoque of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – and thus not a "new" look as such (by early 1948, it was simply known as "The Look" in America[56]) – it was criticised by some as excessively feminine and, with its accompanying corsets and rustle of frilled petticoats, as setting back the "work of emancipation won through participation in two world wars".[57] It also, for a while, bucked the trend towards boyish fashion that, as after the First World War, tended to follow major conflicts.[58]

Juliette Gréco[edit]

At the liberation of Paris in 1944, the American journalist Ernie Pyle observed that the women were all "brightly dressed in white or red blouses and colourful peasant skirts, with flowers in their hair and big flashy earrings."[62] However, in contrast to such striking bohemian adornments and subsequently the "New Look" (which itself scandalised some Parisennes), the clothes of the post-war bohemians were predominantly black: when Gréco first performed outside Saint-Germain she affronted some of her audience by wearing "black trousers, her bare feet slipped into golden sandals".[63] In old age she claimed that this style of dress arose from poverty:

When I was a teenager in Paris ... I only had one dress and one pair of shoes, so the boys in the house started dressing me in their old black coats and trousers. A fashion was shaped out of misery. When people copied me I found it a little ridiculous, but I didn't mind. It made me smile.[64]

Performing in London over fifty years later, Gréco was described as "still ooz[ing] bohemian style".[65]

Saint-Germain in retrospect[edit]

Capturing the spirit of the time, David Profumo has written of how his mother, the actress Valerie Hobson, was entranced by Roger Vadim's flatmate, the director Marc Allégret, while she was filming Blanche Fury in 1947:

Allégret's apparently bohemian lifestyle appealed sharply to her romantic side ... and she revelled in the Left Bank milieu to which he introduced her during script discussions in Paris. There were meals with André Gide, Jean Cocteau and the long-legged Zizi Jeanmaire. For an attractive British woman who felt deprived of attention ... this was an ideal situation for some sort of reawakening.[66]

The previous year a perfume created for Hobson had been marketed as "Great Expectations" to coincide with her role as Estella Havisham in David Lean's film of that name, based on Charles Dickens' 1861 novel. In England, this attracted the custom of then-Oxford University undergraduate Margaret Roberts, later British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who, a little daringly for the time, also shopped for "push-up" pink brassieres.[67] In 1953, when Hobson starred in the musical The King and I in London, it was apparent that she had retained a Parisienne mix of chic and Boheminism. A Daily Mirror journalist described her "pale, ladylike looks, her well-bred clothes ... she likes embroidery and painting", while a young Etonian who visited her dressing room recalled that "it had been freshly painted pink and white for her, and was like entering a risqué French apartment".[68] Ten years later, when Hobson's husband, the politician John Profumo, was involved in a sex scandal that threatened to destabilise the British government, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan wrote that "his [Profumo's] wife is very nice and sensible. Of course, these people live in a raffish, theatrical, bohemian society where no one really knows anyone and everyone is "darling"".[69]

Post-war Paris was recalled fondly in 2007 when France introduced a ban on smoking in public places. The aroma of Gauloises and Gitanes was, for many years, thought to be an inseparable feature of Parisian café society, but the owner of Les Deux Magots, once frequented by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and other writers, observed that "things have changed. The writers of today are not so addicted to cigarettes".[70] A British journalist who interviewed Juliette Gréco in 2010 described Les Deux Magots and the Café de Flore as "now overpriced tourist hotspots" and noted that "chain stores and expensive restaurants have replaced the bookshops, cafés and revolutionary ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's Rive Gauche".[71]

America: the beat generation and flower power[edit]

In the United States adherents of the "beat" counter-culture (probably best defined by Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road, set in the late 1940s, written in 1952 and published in 1957) were associated with black polo-neck (or turtle neck) sweaters, blue denim jeans and sandals. The influence of this movement could be seen in the persona and songs of Bob Dylan in the early to mid-1960s, "road" films like Easy Rider (1969) and the punk-oriented "New Wave" of the mid-1970s, which, among other things, produced a boho style icon in Deborah Harry of the New York band Blondie, whom photographer David LaChapelle has described as "the definition of cool".[72] (However, as with some American musicians of the mid-1960s, such as Sonny and Cher, Blondie came to international prominence only after a tour of Britain in 1978.[73])

Hippiedom and the Pre-Raphaelites[edit]

For men's fashion, the wearing of neckties, which, in the mid-1960s had often drawn on 19th century paisley patterns,[10] declined as muttonchop whiskers and teashades (sunglasses) came in: by the time of the Chicago 7 trial (late 1969), hair over the collars had become so commonplace that it was beginning to transcend Bohemian style, taking on mass popularity in the 1970s. The London art dealer Jeremy Maas reflected in the mid-1980s that

there [was] no question that the Hippy [sic] movement and its repercussive influence in England owed much of its imagery, its manner, dress and personal appearance to the Pre-Raphaelite ideal ... It was observed by all of us who were involved with these exhibitions [of pre-Raphaelite paintings] that visitors included increasing numbers of the younger generation, who had begun to resemble the figures in the pictures they had come to see.[77]

Jimmy Page of the British band Led Zeppelin, who collected Pre-Raphaelite paintings, observed of Edward Burne-Jones that "the romance of the Arthurian legends [captured in his paintings] and the bohemian life of the artists who were reworking these stories seemed very attuned to our time",[78] while the author David Waller noted in 2011 that Burne-Jones' subjects "have much in common with the sixties rock chicks and their pop-star paladins".[79]

London in the 1950s[edit]

Although the annual Saturday Book recorded in 1956 a view that "London's now nothing but flash coffee bars, with teddies and little bits of girls in jeans",[80] the "Edwardian" ("teddy boy") look of the times did not coincide with Bohemian tastes. For women, the legacy of the "New Look" was still apparent, although hemlines had generally risen as, as one journalist put it in 1963, "photographs of those first bold bearers of the New Look make them seem strangely lost and bewildered, as though they had mistaken their cue and come on stage fifty years late".[81] The Bohemian foci during this period were the jazz clubs and espresso bars of Soho and Fitzrovia. Their habitués usually wore polo necks; in the words of one social historian, “thousands of pale, duffel-coat-clad students were hunched in coffee bars over their copies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jack Kerouac”.[82] Various public houses and clubs also catered for Bohemian tastes, notably the Colony Room Club in Soho, opened in 1948 by Muriel Belcher, a lesbian from Birmingham.[83] As with the literary phenomenon of the so-called "Angry Young Men" from 1956 onwards, the image was more a male, than a female, one. However, when the singer Alma Cogan wished to mark her success by buying mink coats for her mother and sister, the actress Sandra Caron, the latter asked for a duffel-coat instead because she wanted to be regarded as a serious actress and "a sort of a beatnik".[84] In 1960 the future author Jacqueline Wilson, who, as a teenager, lived in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, captured this look after spotting two acquaintances in a record shop "in turquoise duffle coats, extremely tight jeans and cha-cha shoes being cuddled by a group of horrible spotty teddy boys".[85]

Others favoured the lower-cut, tighter styles of continental stars such as Bardot or Gina Lollobrigida. Valerie Hobson was among those whose wardrobe drew on Italian couture; in addition to a large collection of stiletto heeled shoes, she possessed a skirt made from python skin.[89] More generally, European tastes – including the Lambretta motor scooter and Italian and French cuisine, which the widely travelled cookery writer Elizabeth David, herself a bit of a Bohemian, did much to promote[90] – not only began to pervade Bohemian circles, but offered a contrast, from 1955 onwards, with the brasher Americanism of rock 'n' roll, with its predominantly teenage associations.

Hamburg and Beatlemania[edit]

In 1960, when the Beatles (then an obscure Liverpudlian combo with five, as opposed to their eventual "fab" four, members) were working in Hamburg, West Germany, they were influenced by a Bohemian "art school" set known as Exis (for "existentialists"). The Exis were roughly equivalent to what in France became known as les beats and included photographer Astrid Kirchherr (for whom the "fifth Beatle" Stuart Sutcliffe left the group) and artist and musician Klaus Voormann (who designed the cover for the Beatles' album Revolver in 1966).

Swinging London[edit]

Beatlemania did not of itself create the apparent iconoclasm of the 1960s; however, as one writer put it, "just as Noël Coward and Cole Porter reflected the louche, carefree attitude of the [Nineteen] Twenties, so did the Beatles' music capture the rhythm of breaking free experienced by an entire generation of people growing up in the Sixties".[10] By the middle of the decade, British pop music had stimulated the fashion boom of what Time called “swinging London”.[97] Associated initially with such "mod" designs as Quant's mini-skirt, this soon embraced a range of essentially Bohemian styles. These included the military and Victorian fashions popularised by stars who frequented boutiques such as Granny Takes a Trip, the "fusion of fashion, art and lifestyle" opened by Nigel Waymouth in the King's Road, Chelsea in January 1966,[98] and, by 1967, the hippie look largely imported from America (although, as noted, London stores such as Biba had, for some time, displayed dresses that drew on Pre-Raphaelite imagery[99]). The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards, whose early girl friend, Linda Keith, had, in her late teens, been a bohemian force in West Hampstead, noted on the Stones' return from an American tour in 1967 how quickly hippiedom had transformed the London scene.[100]

On the face of it, Carroll (a pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) had been a rather conventional and repressed OxfordUniversity don, but he was a keen and artistic photographer in the early days of that medium (taking, among other things, rather bohemian looking pictures of Alice Liddell and other young girls)[103] and he developed an empathy and friendship with several of the Pre-Raphaelites;[104] the sculptor Thomas Woolner and possibly even Rossetti dissuaded him from illustrating Alice himself,[105] a task that was undertaken instead by John Tenniel. The imagery of Alice, both textually and graphically, lent itself well to the psychedelia of the late 1960s.[106] In America, this was apparent in, among other ways, the "Alice happening" in Central Park, New York (1968) when naked participants covered themselves in polka dots[107] and the lyrics to Grace Slick's song "White Rabbit" (1966) – "One pill makes you larger/And one pill makes you small" – that she performed with both the Great Society and Jefferson Airplane, including with the latter at Woodstock in 1969.

Women in the late 1960s and early 1970s[edit]

By the late 1960s shops such as Laura Ashley (whose first London outlet opened in 1968[108]) were routinely promoting the "peasant look" and selling a range of "uniquely eccentric clothes ... The magic was being able to step into a 'Laura Ashley' dress and imagine you had found something out of a dressing-up box".[109] At around the same time too, and into the 1970s, the brassière (or bra), which, as noted, had been seen as a liberating innovation in the early part of the century, came to be regarded by some women, such as the Australian academic Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch, 1969), as an unduly restrictive symbol of traditional womanhood. However, the much-publicised incidence of "bra burning" in the 1970s tended to be overstated and came to be satirised: for example, in the 1973 film, Carry On Girls, and a poster by Young & Rubicam,[110] one of a mildly subversive series for Smirnoff vodka: "I never thought of burning my bra until I discovered Smirnoff". It was also seen by many, including Greer herself, as a distraction from the cause of women's "liberation".[111] A Vermont lawyer later observed wryly that "like every good feminist-in-training in the sixties, I burned my bra", but that "now it's the nineties ... I realize Playtex [underwear manufacturer] had supported me better than any man I know."[112]Claire Perry, who became a ConservativeMember of Parliament in 2010, reflected that, as a "women's officer" at Oxford University in the early 1980s, she was "a bra-burning feminist with a hideous new-romantic haircut", but that her feminism had, in her view, matured.[113]

Since the 1960s: hippie/boho-chic[edit]

Journalist Bob Stanley remarked that "the late 1960s are never entirely out of fashion, they just need a fresh angle to make them de jour".[115] Thus, the features of hippie fashion re-emerged at various stages during the ensuing forty years.

In the mid-to-late 1980s, variants of the short and fundamentally un-Bohemian rah-rah skirt (which originated with cheerleaders) were combined with leather or demin to create a look with some Bohemian or even gothic features (for example, by the singing duo Strawberry Switchblade who took inspiration from 1970s punk fashion[116]). In the 1990s the term, "hippie chic", was applied to Tom Ford’s collections for the Italian house of Gucci. These drew on, among other influences, the style, popular in retrospect, of Talitha Getty (died 1971), actress wife of John Paul Getty and step-granddaughter of Dorelia McNeil, who was represented most famously in a photograph of her and her husband taken by Patrick Lichfield in Marrakesh, Morocco in 1969.[117] Recalling the influx of hippies into Marrakesh in 1968, Richard Neville, then editor of Oz, wrote that "the dapper drifters in embroidered skirts and cowboy boots were so delighted by the bright satin '50s underwear favoured by the matrons of Marrakesh that they wore them outside their denims à la Madonna [the singer] twenty-five years later".[118]

In the early 21st century, "boho-chic" was associated initially with supermodel Kate Moss and then, as a highly popular style in 2004-5, with actress Sienna Miller. In America similar styles were sometimes referred to as "bobo-" or "ashcan chic", or "luxe grunge", their leading proponents including actresses Mary-Kate Olsen and Zooey Deschanel. Established in 1993, the UK clothing label 'OVERIDER' described as 'the brand of a free spirit' and favoured for its understated, effortless, bohemian style exemplifies the 2014 Boho-chic trend. As if to illustrate the cyclical nature of fashion, by the end of the noughties strong pre-Raphaelite traits were notable in, among others, singer Florence Welch and model Karen Elson.

^Though more conventional in many ways than Jane Morris, Georgie Burne-Jones was becoming "a bit of a bohemian" even in the early days of her marriage; for example, she would ask her maid to model for sketches in mid-morning, whereas a typical bourgeois wife would have given priority to the housework: Fiona MacCarthy (2011) The Last Pre-Raphaelite.

^Suzanne Fagence Cooper (2010) The Model Wife: The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, Ruskin and Millais. Florence Nightingale's observations regarding the foxgloves are noted in correspondence of her friend, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose acquaintance with Effie Ruskin dated back to their schooldays. However, it is unclear when Nightingale herself met Effie: Cooper, op.cit, footnote 85. (Gaskell was especially well connected. In 1861, for example, she was part of a house party at Fryston Hall, Yorkshire given by Richard Monckton Milnes – a persistent suitor of Florence Nightingale – that included also the MP William Forster, Austen Layard, who excavated the biblical city of Ninevah, and the American (Union) Minister in London, Charles Francis Adams. Gaskell was among a group visiting nearby Pomfret Castle when Adam received news of the Trent incident that, in the early stages of the American Civil War almost brought Britain and the Union to war: see Amanda Foreman (2010) A World on Fire.)

^Kate Adie (2013) Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One. Tilley was actively involved in recruitment for war service and was happily married to her songwriter, Walter de Frece, who was later knighted and became a Member of Parliament.

^Rhoda Marley to Clive FitzWatters and Harold Twine in Travers, Rookery Nook, chapter XII. Offering to assist her, Clive had suggested to Twine that "it will be more or less guess-work on my part – in the bag put one pair of thin com – er – lady's summer underwear". Rhoda asked if Twine "could just manage a pair of cami-knickers and a Princess petticoat". As early as 1920, in Travers' début novelThe Dippers, Pauline Dipper's "black silk petticoat [did not] extend unduly, and it was possible to esteem the shapely outline of calf and instep, compressed in stockings of the same material" (chapter III). Also in The Dippers, a young woman tried to start a conversation about "hygienic underclothing for ladies" with a man she mistakenly believed to have written articles on the subject: "I wanted to speak to you about something delicate ... this is not a subject one can discuss in public. People have such conventional ideas" (Helen Monk to Henry Talboyes, chapter VIII).

^Quoted in Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion (10th ed. 1993) edited by John Walker. Almost 70 years after Lombard's death, the Sunday Times described red lipstick as the "ne plus ultra [not further beyond] of make up ... We respect red lipstick as a badge of loveliness and youth (Georgia May), bold style (Florence Welch), sexual confidence (Scarlett Johansson) and old-school glamour (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley) – and, above all, we appreciate that it doesn't work for everyone": Shane Watson in Style, 4 December 2011.

^Tim Stanley, 'Speaking in Code' in History Today, October 2014 at page 21. Dietrich made clear her personal preference for such clothes: "I do not wear them to be sensational. I think I am much more alluring ..." (quoted, ibid.).

^Norah Alexander in Daily Mail, 13 March 1948. In a cartoon of 1949 David Langdon had a vendeuse saying to a customer, "By 'New Look' I take it you mean what we now consider 'Old Look', but not the 'Old Look' which preceded the 'New Look': Punch, 30 March 1949.

^With reference to the colourless "utility" garments that became commonplace in Britain during the war, Phillips (loc.cit.) quotes an expert of the time at London's Victoria and Albert Museum as asserting that "men will feel oppressed and frightened by excessive femininity when they return from war".

^David Profumo (2006) Bringing the House Down. In contrast to Vadim, who had not turned twenty, Allégret (1900–73) was in middle age when he directed Hobson. He had been married to the daughter of the editor of French Vogue, who left him after the war for a theatrical agent, André Bernham, taking their daughter with her (ibid). Jeanmaire is probably best remembered through the second line – "And you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire" – of Peter Sarstedt's song "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?" (1969) which captured the spirit of Parisian high life in the late 1960s.

^Simon Winchester (2011) The Alice Behind Wonderland. Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was the daughter of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, where Dodgson was a Fellow.

^The first American branch of Laura Ashley opened in San Francisco in 1974, but had closed by the time a shop opened in New York in 1981 (Laura Ashley products having been sold in Bloomingdales and Macy's department stores for some years): Anne Sebba (1990) Laura Ashley: a Life By Design

^In 2013 The Oldie published a cartoon depicting women suffragettes of the early 20th century with the caption "... but I'm not sure about this proposal to burn our whalebone corsets" (Oldie, February 2013). A pragmatic 21st-century view was that "feminism is not about burning your bra in the street. It is about [among other things] women getting up in the morning and leaving the house to go to a job that pays them an actual wage ..." (Laura Smith, letter in Metro, 30 October 2012).